Fiction

I need to get strong, I think. I do push-ups until I hit ten and do more until I lose count. I do push-ups until my arms can’t work. I stand up again and see myself in the mirror, but I don’t look any stronger. I think hard and long and can’t remember what kind of cigarettes my father smoked.  

He and I met on Nishat’s rooftop terrace every day, obscured by the shadows of linens drying on the clothesline, the water tank watching over us like a sentry.

When I was a kid my mother said that I was a fish. Or, if not a fish, some sea creature that she had found washed up on the shore at sunrise.

The first part that fell off was my finger. My pinkie. It floated down the creek after I stooped down to feel the water’s cool flow.

By the time it all happened, the monsoons had come and the mango tree had been stripped bare.

When she pulls out her keys under a cantaloupe-slice moon, I drop unnoticed onto a strip of yellow weeds by the curb.

The day my neighbor ran over his wife with a lawnmower, I decided to acknowledge the mold spreading itself over the cheese.

I picture kneading Rayan’s mound, needing the seed back into the earth, pushing and pulling until it spreads up through her body, reclaimed as ours.